Fragility is a pathology that can be prevented fundamentally with physical exercise, the control of medication and adequate nutritional guidelines, beginning with screening from pharmacies, as explained by several experts during the round table ‘Attention to frailty, a possible new professional pharmaceutical service in the approach to the elderly?’, organized by FontActiv as part of the Infarma 2023 European Pharmacy Meeting.
Fragility is not something irreversible, being possible to delay or even avoid its appearance. A professional service in the pharmacy supported by the prescription of physical exercise, the management of polypharmacy and the control of nutrition, will contribute to preventing it or detecting it early.
The head of the Geriatric Service of the Albacete University Hospital Complex, Dr. Pedro Abizanda, has stressed the importance of “screening for frailty from the pharmacy” but also “referring these patients to specialized health professionals since a more accurate diagnosis is somewhat more complex”.
Older people, more vulnerable
Frailty is a stage of predisability that consists of the loss of the functional reserve inherent to aging that makes older people more vulnerable to external factors and that may end up translating into more hospitalizations, more likely to end up admitted to a social health center and even higher mortality. However, despite all these implications, it remains a fairly unknown risk factor, both among the general population and even among healthcare professionals themselves.
Although it is a risk factor that has been known for a relatively short time, frailty is a fairly common condition in the elderly population. “In people over 65 there are up to 12 percent of people who present frailty and, in more than 80 years, this percentage reaches 30 percent”, explained doctor Pedro Abizanda.
Dr. Abizanda has pointed out how frailty is one of the main risk factors, surpassing other classic ones such as hypertension. “Detecting frailty can be very simple in the community pharmacy, with something as basic as measuring gait speed, a highly predictive factor for this condition”, added the Vice President of the Spanish Society of Clinical, Family and Community Pharmacy (SEFAC) of Castilla La Mancha, Luís García Morenothe other speaker at the round table on attention to fragility.
Along with nutritional control, both experts have emphasized the importance of an exercise prescription appropriate to the characteristics of each person and the importance of proper management of the prescribed drugs, since some of these can increase the risk of frailty.
Therefore, addressing the implications of frailty can become a new professional pharmaceutical service that helps manage it in the elderly.